Thursday, April 27, 2006

Every week, I'm going to pick out something that happened in the past five days that was the most assinine, redundant or worthless waste of time and effort. I've been carrying my camera everywhere in hopes to chronicle potential winners. The nominees this week:

Military ball

MILES Detail

Range support

Doing nothing all day but getting released at 5PM

And the winner is:

MILES Detail!For the uninitiated, MILES is a laser tag of sorts we use. Transmitters are attached to guns that fire when you pull the trigger with blanks in the weapon. Receivers are worn on your person or on vehicles, and you 'die' if it beeps. It sounds like good training can come out of this, right? The problem is it never works. Ever. They always malfunction or plain don't work. There are even officials that watch over a mock battle and 'kill off' people who have been shot at. The Army spends untolds millions for this equipment and even has civilians to maintain it in warehouses. This past week was all about unloading them from connexes to make sure everything is there before we turn it into the warehouse. Now there are two things wrong with what happened: they waited until 3PM to start, and the contents have already been checked and confirmed. Twice. It took awhile because the cases are massive and many need to be carried by 2-4 people, and of course higher ranking guys are standing around with their hands in their pockets telling us to hurry up while they tell yo momma jokes. I understand privileges come with rank, but they want to get home quick yet refuse to help speed it along. A very obvious Catch 22.

Above: Soldiers find out what isn't on

recruiting posters.

It doesn't end there. While we're waiting for two hours for the checklist of contents, we're told to clean the equipment on the inside, which had been done after we got back from NTC. After that is completed, we receive word to clean the boxes themselves. The outsides even, though later it's going to be transported in a dirty truck on its way to a dirty warehouse to be stored on the dirty ground. That moment right there sealed the detail for Stupid Shit of The Week™.

This blog was created by a veteran of the United States Army and in no way should be taken to reflect the sensibilities of the Department of Defense, The Department of Veterans Affairs or any other credible organization.